"Close" reading captures the meaning

You may have heard the phrase "a close reading". I believe it means to find the author's method of communicating the message to the reader; to not just read the words, but to discover the underlying message. A book I recently purchased is helping me do this. It's "Giving the sense: how to read aloud with meaning" by Nedra Newkirk Lamar.

Lamar writes (p. 15): "When we speak, we naturally emphasize each new idea, and subdue the old. It's automatic." 

Here's her first example:

"Suppose you said to a newly-arrived visitor: 

    Here is a very comfortable chair. Please, sit in this chair.

Probably you would slightly stress comfortable and chair in the first sentence. Would you stress chair in the second sentence? Certainly not.

In the first sentence, chair is the new idea. In the second sentence, sit is the new idea, while chair is an old idea and does not need to be emphasized, but rather, subdued."

That example is very clear. But Lamar goes on to give us some harder-to-analyse examples. Here's one from the Bible (page 17:)

[5] And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. [6] He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. [7] And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; (Matt. 28)

Lamar explains: "In the last verse, is that he is risen from the dead new? Isn't it all old from verse 6? Isn't the new idea disciples? So wouldn't you need a good stress on disciples, going up high enough in pitch so that you could then drop your pitch and subdue the entire phrase that he is risen from the dead?"

So, this has helped me to understand Amos. My first reading brought a sigh: so much repetition. Unintelligible. Then I tried looking for the new idea. Ah. Lightbulb. The book does indeed repeat the theme of sinning. But the new idea is who the author is identifying as having sinned, i.e. "the people of Damascus" (Amos 1: 3), "the people of Gaza" (Amos 1: 6), "the people of Tyre" (verse 9), etc. Once I saw that there is a pattern here, I could sift through all those words and find the author's purpose and strategy.

I love this enabling way of reading, especially of reading sacred texts, and I'm having fun trying this method to my reading aloud too!

Julie Swannell